President Bush signed emergency legislation that will allow Terri Schiavo’s parents to ask a federal judge to extend their daughter’s life, AP reports. After signing the bill, Bush said,

“In cases like this one, where there are serious questions and substantial doubts, our society, our laws and our courts should have a presumption in favor of life.”

Yet again, Schiavo’s fate now rests in the hands of a judge. It is not known when the judge will rule, AP reports.

Thanks to the Family Research Council, you can listen to audio of Schiavo and her father following the removal of her feeding tube on Friday.

*CORRECTION/UPDATE 1106am - The Blue State Conservatives blog reports that Terri’s brother, Bobby, told talk show host Glenn Beck that the audio tape was mischaracterized.

Other mirrors here, here, and here.

Via Xrlq and NZPundit, here’s the legal definition of “persistent vegetative state” under Florida Statute § 765.101(12):

“Persistent vegetative state” means a permanent and irreversible condition of unconsciousness in which there is:

(a) The absence of voluntary action or cognitive behavior of any kind.

(b) An inability to communicate or interact purposefully with the environment.

Related:

- Videos of Terri

- A nurse’s perspective

- Liberals for Terri blog

- Patterico notes that the Schiavo legislation enjoyed surprisingly broad support: “[V]oting Democrats in the House were nearly evenly split, with 47 voting in favor and 53 against. (Republicans overwhelmingly voted for the bill, 156-5.)”

- See how your congressman voted here.

- Wall Street Journal,“Terri Schiavo and the Law”

- Glenn Reynolds has no opinion on the case.

- James Q. Wilson, “Killing Terri” (WSJ subscription required). An excerpt:

What is lacking in this matter is not the correct set of jurisdictional rules but a decent set of moral imperatives.

That moral imperative should be that medical care cannot be withheld from a person who is not brain dead and who is not at risk for dying from an untreatable disease in the near future. To do otherwise makes us recall Nazi Germany where retarded people and those with serious disabilities were “euthanized” (that is, killed). We hear around the country echoes of this view in the demands that doctors be allowed to participate, as they do in Oregon, in physician-assisted suicide, whereby doctors can end the life of patients who request death and have less than six months to live. This policy endorses the right of a person to end his or her life with medical help. It is justified by the alleged success of this policy in the Netherlands.

But it has not been a success in the Netherlands. In that country there have been well over 1,000 doctor-induced deaths among patients who had not requested death, and in a large fraction of those cases the patients were sufficiently competent to have made the request had they wished.

Keeping people alive is the goal of medicine. We can only modify that policy in the case of patients for whom death is imminent and where all competent family members believe that nothing can be gained by extending life for a few more days. This is clearly not the case with Terri Schiavo. Indeed, her death by starvation may take weeks. Meanwhile, her parents are pleading for her life.

Update: Gerard van der Leun is reading George Felos–and it will weird you out.

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